Review: 2013 Honda Accord V6 Touring

LET’S BEGIN WITH your state of mind: You want to buy a sedan, mid- to full-size, good gas mileage, nice cabin. You want it to look good, but you’re averse to showy displays. Safety is important, so, seat belts.

A sedan! What a splendidly calculated choice. Let me be the first to congratulate you on your sense of equilibrium. Four doors, four seasons, four winds blowing. Makes you think.

You have lots of company. Four of the 10 best-selling vehicles in the U.S. are front-drive, four-door, five-seat, C- or D-segment sedans, about a half-million annually, representing nearly 20% of the total light-vehicle market. These are the sturdy milkmaids of the middle class.

But perhaps you’re wondering why a sedan seems so inevitable, given that there are so many other kinds of vehicles, from a Mini Cooper Countryman to a Ford F-350 Club Cab (long bed, fifth wheel), and every coupe, cabrio and compact that flies or crawls? Family sedans do sort of have a penitential air to them. You don’t own them so much as do time in them.

It’s because you’re rational. You’ve taken a very complex set of vehicle attributes, plotted them as coordinates in three-axis space—the axes being money, performance, commodity—and concluded the classic, three-box family sedan represents, altogether, the best compromise on all fronts. Sedans have great-looking number clouds.

People shopping for family sedans are therefore predisposed to extreme reasonableness. It is here that the Honda Accord has the segment by the throat.

Has there ever been a more radically reasonable automobile than the Honda Accord? Even its name means consensus. Big, but not too big; attractive, but too familiar to be provocative; well-appointed, but incapable of igniting sustained envy. The car’s trademarked engine note—sweet, high, isolated—is flirtatious, never carnal. Across a host of comparative metrics, from trunk space to fuel economy, from horsepower to stopping power, year after year, the Accord strives not for superlatives in any one category but a portfolio of general excellence in all.

Example: The segment bogey at the moment is the great Hyundai Sonata with a 2.0-liter, 274-horsepower turbo four-cylinder. The new Accord EX-L and Sonata Turbo are almost identical in price (around $28,500), size, interior room and cabin amenities. The Accord’s new direct-injection 2.4-liter four gives up 89 hp (185 hp) but is lighter, quieter and returns a whopping 4 miles per gallon better in combined fuel economy with a new continuously variable transmission.

Since fuel economy matters all of the time and marginal advantages in acceleration matter almost none of the time, reasonable people agree that’s a constructive compromise. And while big horsepower is nice, so is a refined, pleasant powertrain sound. The Sonata’s shimmering turbo thrash is fun but not exactly family-friendly.

Plus, the Sonata…dear, don’t you think that’s too flashy to go out in? Flashy is for other people.

It’s no secret that Honda has had a miserable couple of years. Like the rest of Japan, the company was deeply affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Production was also disrupted by flooding in Thailand last year. The yen has been strong and European demand weak.

And in the midst of all that, the U.S.-market products have slumped, drifting into mediocrity, which is the stupid stepbrother of reasonableness. Honda lost market share. The press was unkind to the redesigned Civic—it’s possible I might have used the word “treason”—and the company is now embarked upon what its chief executive last month called nothing less than “global reform.” Please have him swing by the U.N. when he’s done.

The early results can be felt in the Accord redesign, which returns the nameplate to its usual holistic excellence. Actually, this car feels less like a ninth-gen redesign than a proper sorting out of Gen 8. Even though the car is 3.5 inches shorter overall, and even though the front suspension has gone from double A-arm to McPherson strut, it looks as though the team of stylists barely changed pens. The Accord is still a deliberate, substantial hunk of sedan, with a spacious greenhouse, thick flanks and large doors. A bit bovine, really. It’s an optical wonder the way so large a car can seem to disappear before your eyes.

In the upper trim levels you can get LED headlamps that tuck under the headlamp assembly like beaded eyelashes. That jazzes up the look quite a bit. There’s more brightwork and definition around the car’s grille—but not unreasonably so.

As I count them, the new Accord had three priorities, all achieved: to regain competitiveness in fuel economy and powertrain sophistication; to re-establish the brand’s advantage in refinement and noise abatement; and to correct—even overcorrect, if possible—the impression left by recent Hondas that management cheaped out on materials.

As for the first, the Accord will be available with three powertrains: the 2.4-liter (185 hp, 181 pound-feet) with either CVT, auto or manual transmission; the carry-over 3.5-liter V6, now with 278 hp (21/34 mpg) buttoned to the six-speed automatic only (the Accord Coupe V6 will be available with a six-speed manual); and a 196-hp, plug-capable hybrid powertrain arriving next year with a marquee economy number of more than 100 mpg-e (gasoline-gallon equivalent).

I know the 2.4-liter is the newsy powertrain—the Accord’s first direct-injection engine—but I have to tell you, after recently driving big, clattery DI engines like the one in the Cadillac ATS[?], I was glad to drive the Accord with the V6, which is still port fuel-injected and still a spools to the 7,000-rpm redline with an easy athleticism and aerospace smoothness. With the six-speed automatic pulled down into Sport mode, the V6 cracks off a 5.6-second 0-60 mph time and pours midrange torque over the first four gears. If the Sport mode feels a bit too antsy, the transmission regular Drive mode is almost too calm (balance, see?). If you engage the Accord’s ECON mode—the bezel of the speedometer glows an encouraging green when you do—the Accord’s powertrain gets downright aggressive in the fuel saving. I was seeing almost 25 mph on a couple-hundred-mile interstate drive.

By stick and rudder, the Accord feels direct, agile and capable, with quick reflexes summoned through the electric power steering system and an appealing tendency to stay planted in corners. The light, lofting ride compliance on the highway gives way to a surprisingly muscular cornering on country lanes.

But the biggest improvement of the car brings together the second and third priorities. This is a resoundingly more solid and satisfying car than before, an impression of substance that extends from the door handles to the seat frames. Wind noise at 70 mph is just about nil, for instance. The cabin materials of our full-dresser V6—with fine-grain leather seats, door gussets and steering wheel, as well as lovely gloss-black resins and alloy trim—step way up from last year’s car.

Look, people who shop for family sedans are Vulcans, driven by logic, denying the temptations of emotion. They constitute a self-selected audience of the deeply reasonable and intensely practical. The new Accord will resonate with them. I predict it will live long and prosper.